29 March 2012

Clean energy should play a central role in revitalizing our economy,
putting Americans back to work, and keeping America on the cutting edge
of innovation and growth. Recently a slew of misguided attacks on the
merits of clean energy have exchanged petty partisanship for hard facts.
Here are the top six things you really need to know:

27 March 2012

If you wanted to see what happens when poor planning and climate change collide, the place to be last night was a floods forum in the Melbourne Bayside suburb of Elwood, which was subject to severe flooding a year ago.
The local mayor and councillors, MPs and neighbouring councillors all fronted up to a packed hall of 300 people, but there were two noticeable absences. Despite promising to come, no-one from Melbourne Water, which is responsible for the drainage system across Melbourne, actually turned up. And the state government, which is ultimately responsible for planning, did not send a representative despite numerous requests, including on the floor of parliament.

23 March 2012

Around the world an increasing number of detailed policy road maps are demonstrating the possibility, necessity and urgency of a rapid transition to a just and sustainable post carbon future. The key barriers to this transition are social and political, not technological and financial.
The Post Carbon Pathways report, published by the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne and the Centre for Policy Development has reviewed 18 of the most comprehensive and rigorous post carbon economy transition strategies.
As Australia enters the next phase of the climate change policy debate, this report will provide vital information on how other jurisdictions are designing and implementing large-scale plans to remove carbon from their economies.

19 March 2012

14 March 2012: Australia's CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology have released their State of the Climate 2012. The report is here, there is a commentary at The Conversation, and I have reproduced their full media release below. An interactive data visualisation explores sea level rise
patterns across Australia using data sets provided to the ABC by CSIRO.

Changes in average temperature for Australia for each year (orange
line) and each decade (grey boxes), and 11-year average (black line –
an 11-year period is the standard used by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change). Anomalies are the departure from the 1961-1990
average climatological period. The average value for the most recent
10-year period (2002–2011) is shown in darker grey. Bureau of Meteorology

It is a concise and very useful compilation of the data, but on one point they have taken a very conservative stand. One of the most reported findings in both the mass and social media was that the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration of the atmosphere had risen to around 390 parts
per million in 2011, a level unprecedented in the past 800,000 years. Given the new available evidence, that should be 15 million years.
That's right, CO levels have not been as high today in the last 15 million years!!

Climate Commission report: The science behind southeast Australia’s wet, cool summer, and climate link to heavy rains http://climatecommission.gov.au/topics/the-science-behind-southeast-australias-wet-cool-summer/Most parts of Australia have experienced exceptionally heavy rains over the past two years, filling many dams around the country and breaking the drought of 1997–2009. There has been much confusion in the media about what this means for climate change. This report seeks to set the record straight.

12 March 2012

NASA climate science chief James Hansen’s description of the aerosol dilemma as a “Faustian bargain” has been dramatically illustrated in a new scientific paper by Damon Matthews and Kirsten Zickfeld and published in Nature on 4 March 2012. As we previously discussed in Beyond the carbon price, a Faustian bargain:

Human activity modifies the impact of the greenhouse effect by the
release of airborne particulate pollutants known as aerosols. These
include black-carbon soot, organic carbon, sulphates, nitrates, as well
as dust from smoke, manufacturing, wind storms, and other sources.
Aerosols have a net cooling effect because they reduce the amount of
sunlight that reaches the ground and they increase cloud cover. This is
popularly known as "global dimming", because the overall aerosol impact
is to mask some of the warming effect of greenhouse gases. Aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere by rain on average every 10
days, so their cooling effect is only maintained because of continuing
human pollution, the principal source of which is the burning of fossil
fuels, which also cause a rise in carbon dioxide levels and global
warming that lasts for many centuries.

11 March 2012

Concern over Greenland warming: tipping point at 1.6C warming?http://main.omanobserver.om/node/86372
AFP/Oman Observer, 10 March 2012
The Greenland ice sheet is more sensitive to global warming than thought, for just a relatively small — but very long term — temperature rise would melt it completely, according to a study published.

Just back from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science
annual conference 2012, this is Alex Smith. I've recorded two of the
best speechs of the weekend gathering of thousands of scientists, held
this year in Vancouver, Canada.

01 March 2012

Recently, the Labor member for Blaxland in the Australian Parliament, Jason Clare, fired a salvo at the Liberal opposition for their hypocrisy on carbon pricing: claiming it would cost coal jobs while they were busily… investing in more coal.
Here’s an extract, courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald: